New Business Organizational Structures: Why It’s Time to Blow Up Convention

Via GigaOM on May 21, 2013 No Responses

It’s time to turn those innovation initiatives towards your org chart and create new business organizational structures.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history can tip their hat to many of the truly groundbreaking developments of the Industrial Age. But even the staunchest history buff would agree that, while remarkable for their time, those innovations would be antiquated at best in today’s business landscape. So why do the vast majority of companies continue with an employee hierarchy that wouldn’t seem out of place in a museum? In this post at GigaOM Dave Kashen, founder of Unleashed, points to examples of new business organizational structures and explains why you should consider adopting one.

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How Non-Traditional Marketing Can Put You On The Map

Via TechCrunch on May 20, 2013 4 Responses

By selling their app out of a VW Bus, the Divvy team proves that non-traditional marketing can give you an edge in a crowded market place.

No matter where you turn, it seems someone is coming up with a truly great idea for an app or product. With a market that’s seemingly saturated with brilliance, how can you stand out? Well, as the team at Divvy has shown, a little quirkiness can go a long way. Sarah Perez explains how they are leveraging non-traditional marketing to build up some buzz in this post at TechCrunch.

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Choosing a Co-Founder: 3 Mistakes to Avoid

Via OnStartups on May 13, 2013 No Responses

It’s important to learn from your mistakes as an entrepreneur, but don’t make choosing a co-founder one of those lessons.

It’s important to have a co-founder, and not just because you want someone to celebrate with when you get purchased by Google. You want your co-founder to not only complete the knowledge that you lack, but be an integral member of a truly awesome team.

Which is why, in this guest post at OnStartups, Jessica Alter, co-founder and CEO of FounderDating, says choosing a co-founder is such an important step in starting your business.

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Why Storytelling Leads to Great Product Design

Via GigaOM on May 10, 2013 No Responses

Truly great product design doesn’t come from beautiful looking products, but products that function beautifully.

It’s time to re-create storytelling in your office. And no, this does not mean you should all gather around a campfire with sticks and a bag of marshmallows. If you want to execute great product design, your team of designers needs to start thinking in terms of stories, not in terms of blueprints, according to this post at GigaOM by Braden Kowitz, leader of the Google Ventures Design Studio.

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Discover the Top 50 Social Media Influencers of 2013

Via Forbes on May 8, 2013 No Responses

Social is a truly democratizing medium, so cut through the nonsense to discover who the real social medial influencers are.

Just because you stand on a taller podium and have a larger audience doesn’t necessarily make you the most influential. But how do you find out who is being truly influential? That’s exactly the task that Haydn Shaughnessy has undertaken at Forbes. After carefully crafting and re-crafting his criteria he has come up with the list of 2013 most important social media influencers.

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photo by: David Hilowitz

Two Amazing Tools for Prioritizing Content Creation

Via Content Marketing Institute on May 7, 2013 No Responses

You’re likely seeing an increase in requests for content marketing materials, so it’s more important than ever to create a process for prioritizing content creation.

With content marketing continuing to rapidly grow in popularity, your team is probably seeing an avalanche of requests for new content — often with turnaround times that are borderline unmanageable. So how do you decide between the fire drills and the actual fires?

In this post at the Content Marketing Institute, Gina Balarin, Content Manager at Concur, explains two incredibly useful tools for prioritizing content creation.

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How to Be More Productive with Your Day: Tips and Tricks

Via Business Insider on May 6, 2013 No Responses

Learn how to be more productive while attempting to fit an infinite number of tasks into the finite hours of your day.

With an ever expanding number of projects and requests for your time, it’s no wonder when the end of the day rolls around and you don’t feel like you’ve truly been productive. Social media, content marketing initiatives, brainstorming sessions…and somewhere in between it all you’ve got to fit in lunch.

So how do you make your day work for you? In this post at Business Insider, Eric Barker provides you with a cheat sheet of tips to learn how to be more productive each day.

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Develop Business Growth Strategies: Don’t Make These Myth-takes

Via VentureBeat on May 3, 2013 No Responses

Taking these growth myths as truth will not only stifle your ability to develop business growth strategies — they can even kill your business.

You want your company to grow. It’s a natural progression of a developing business. But it can be a tricky road to navigate, and it’s filled with soothsayers and false prophets. As you make your way towards growth you’ll encounter more myths than Aesop could ever hope to document.

In order to develop business growth strategies that are successful it’s important to understand and debunk these myths, say entrepreneurs Keary Crawford and Wayne Simmons at VentureBeat.

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Developing a Process for Onboarding Engineers Can Pay Huge Dividends

Via Asana on May 2, 2013 No Responses

You’ll find there are a lot of benefits to your business by simply cleaning up and organizing the ways you go about onboarding engineers.

Imagine being plopped into the dense middle of a foreign city all by yourself. Tiny roads wind this way and that. People scurry about in seemingly every direction at once. You can’t understand a word of what anyone is saying or why they seem to be doing whatever it is they’re doing. It would be exhausting, wouldn’t it?

Well, when you hire a new engineer and throw them into the fire of your already built up systems, it’s essentially the same thing. To avoid that exhaustion, it’s imperative to design a solid system for onboarding engineers, explains Greg Slovacek in a post at the Asana Blog.

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Unlock the Crucial Triggers to Viral Marketing

Via Monetate on May 1, 2013 No Responses

Everyone is trying to get their brand to go viral, but Jonah Berger, bestselling author of Contagious, has found 6 principals that drive viral marketing.

When it comes to Walt Disney World vs. Honey Nut Cheerios it would seem that the more talked about entity would be easy to pick. After all, Walt Disney World is full of excitement and characters from the movies you love. Honey Nut Cheerios is the cereal you’ve unceremoniously eaten for breakfast for more years than you care to count. Walt Disney is the sexy pick. And the wrong one. Honey Nut Cheerios has more word of mouth clout. As Sarah Etter explains at Monetate, the reasoning behind it is just one of Jonah Berger’s six triggers to viral marketing.

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